In public education, delivering high-quality services to every student, particularly in our most impoverished communities, is a perennial challenge. However, state, district, and school leaders are getting increasingly adept at designing and using tools to make sure that limited resources are used most effectively to promote student learning and ongoing school improvement. When formalized as a system, an assessment or similar tool can be used to identify specific needs (commonly termed a “needs assessment”), explore these needs in some depth to identify the gap or discrepancy between “what is” and “what should be” and to identify the root cause(s) of any such gaps, and then use the information and analysis to set priorities for future action